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Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

blog.upbound.io

11–20 of 39 posts

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#12
post #11
post #8

This looks fairly similar to the new Kuberentes KEP for portable service definitions.... https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/...

Very similar. Can someone more familiar with Crossplane/KEP comment?

Hi, this is ichekrygin (crossplane maintainer). Yes, indeed. There appears to be an overlap in general principles (even in use-case example). From what it appears, KEP sig was "published/released" (not sure what is the right term here) on the GitHub 3 days ago, we did not see this. However, now since it out there, we will definitely reach out to discuss.

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#14
post #13

What are the benefits of using Crossplane as opposed to Terraform?

It seems like you would still use both. Terraform to provision your Kubernetes cluster and other non-application specific infrastructure.

It seems like, and I have only briefly read the article, Crossplane is meant to bring all that application specific cloud infrastructure into the same configuration files you would use for defining you Kubernetes application.

So along with defining your ingress you define your mysql database and it gets provisioned. This keeps all your application specific provisioning together instead of having to use Terraform to provision your database ahead of time and keep it in sync with the application.

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#15
This looks really exciting and congratulations on launching! We will definitely be taking a look at this as it looks like a great fit to recommend to our customers.

My startup Meshcloud [0] is helping companies manage the "organizational" side of multi-cloud like integrating account provisioning, SSO, policies, chargeback, quotas etc. using a declarative orchestration approach we call "org as code" (basically infrastructure as code but for org stuff). Our product is e.g. used by a large german car manufacturer to orchestrate hundreds of tenants across AWS, Azure and a mix of private Clouds based on OpenStack, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. Workload orchestration is obviously the next challenge down the road for these customers, so we're currently looking at providing good integration to tools like Open Service Broker API, Terraform, Bosh, Spinnaker etc. Each of those solves a slightly different set of problems but at the scale our customers are operating at they all have their place.

0. https://www.meshcloud.io/en/meshcloud/

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#16
post #10

At GitLab we're really excited about the vision of Crossplane. Multi-cloud seems to be the future [0]. This is the missing technology to make that convenient. Our first step is to work with Bassam to become the first complex application deployed in this way. We already have a popular helm chart. But that doesn't set you up with things like object storage and a cloud managed databases (PostgreSQL and Redis). After we…

What is the business model of upbound/Crossplane? Product seems to be free.

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#17
post #10

At GitLab we're really excited about the vision of Crossplane. Multi-cloud seems to be the future [0]. This is the missing technology to make that convenient. Our first step is to work with Bassam to become the first complex application deployed in this way. We already have a popular helm chart. But that doesn't set you up with things like object storage and a cloud managed databases (PostgreSQL and Redis). After we…

What is the business model of upbound/Crossplane? Product seems to be free.

hi bassam here (CEO @ Upbound). Our business model is still firming up, but we're thinking we would be hosting crossplanes among other things. We want the crossplane project to be community driven (and not vendor driven) and welcome other contributors (see our governance model).

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#18

I thought it was going to be a cross-cloud Terraform, but it looks like it's a bunch of presets operating on k8s? So when he asks for the DB, is he getting an RDS/CloudSQL/whatever or is it spinning up a DB on an EKS/GKE/whatever? I really don't like the latter in comparison to the former, tbh.

> I thought it was going to be a cross-cloud Terraform

Isn't Terraform already cross-cloud?

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#19
post #10

At GitLab we're really excited about the vision of Crossplane. Multi-cloud seems to be the future [0]. This is the missing technology to make that convenient. Our first step is to work with Bassam to become the first complex application deployed in this way. We already have a popular helm chart. But that doesn't set you up with things like object storage and a cloud managed databases (PostgreSQL and Redis). After we…

What is the business model of upbound/Crossplane? Product seems to be free.

I asked Bassam if it would be completely open source (and not open core like GitLab) in the architecture document [0]. He said it would be completely open source [1].

0. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1whncqdUeU2cATGEJhHvzXWC9...

1. https://www.dropbox.com/s/bypp7unw8802gkr/Screenshot%202018-...

Re: Crossplane – Open Source Multicloud Control Plane

#20
post #18

I thought it was going to be a cross-cloud Terraform, but it looks like it's a bunch of presets operating on k8s? So when he asks for the DB, is he getting an RDS/CloudSQL/whatever or is it spinning up a DB on an EKS/GKE/whatever? I really don't like the latter in comparison to the former, tbh.

> I thought it was going to be a cross-cloud Terraform Isn't Terraform already cross-cloud?

From the architecture document:

Terraform is a popular tool for provisioning infrastructure across cloud providers. It offers a declarative configuration language with support for templating, composability, referential integrity and dependency management. Terraform can dynamically provision infrastructure and perform changes when the tool is run by a human. Unlike Crossplane, Terraform does not support workload portability across cloud providers, and does not have any active controllers that can react to failures, or make changes to running infrastructure without human intervention. Terraform attempts to solve multicloud at the tool level, while Crossplane is at the API and control plane level. Terraform is open source under a MPL license, and follows an open core business model, with a number of its features closed source. We are evaluating whether we can use Terraform to accelerate the development of resource controllers in Crossplane.

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